About Me

Photo By Adam Collishaw

I live with my wife and daughter in Nanaimo, British Columbia Canada where I'm a wedding and portrait photographer with a studio named Vivid Photography with my good friend Adam Collishaw.  Though I have always been appreciative of the art I started taking photography seriously around 2007 when I bought a Panasonic FZ50 (to replace my old Pentax film SLR) as a hobby camera.  I ended up spending a huge amount of time with that camera running around learning everything I could.  Like most people I started off chasing ducks and photographing landscapes.  At some point I just lost interest in that once I started pointing my camera at something I've always been passionate about, people.  Being a little brand loyal at the time I bought a Panasonic DMC-L1 followed by an Olympus E3.  

It didn't take long for my friend Adam and I to decide to open up a little business where we tried to sell photography to businesses for events and to newspapers for sports.  We finally worked up the nerve to try portraits in 2008 and in 2009 we tried our first wedding and photographed 3 in our first year.  Now we photograph about 20 weddings a year and have been featured recently in the Wedding Ring Magazine.  Weddings have definitely become my primary photography passion.  I love the emotion and importance and pressure of the day.  To me, weddings are the Superbowl of photography.  You just don't get another chance to get it right.  I love photographing people, we are such an amazing creature and trying to capture our beauty is really a rewarding challenge.  I also realize (even though it does scare me a little) how much of ourselves we show to the world through our photographs.

In my personal time I photograph models as I continue to develop my craft and passion for the art and I hope one day to have my own show at a gallery.  That would be my dream come true.  I also blog about photography the art, the technique, the industry and the equipment, all of which I am really fascinated with.  It almost doesn't matter to me how many people read the blog as it is often a bit of a personal photography note book, but then again I really very much enjoy sharing and talking with other photographers.  I respect photographers that share their knowledge and vision with others rather than hide it away.  

I have my heroes and idols in the industry starting with Richard Avedon, Helmut Newton, Annie Leibovitz and Arnold Newman and more recently with Jerry Ghionis and Yervant.  Having said that though I often spend hours at a time just consuming photography art on websites like 500px or Flickr and the explosion of this craft in popularity just amazes me every day.  I am often humbled by just how amazing people are especially when they put so much of their own personality in their images.  

I've since gone full circle with equipment and I'm now back using film with an Olympus OM camera and Pentax medium format, but of course I still use digital cameras for work and pleasure.  I also hope to develop skills in a couple of new areas of interest (food and street photography) and one day I'd like to be a better landscape photographer.  I think that will come when I find a quieter time in my life.  

I'm not terribly brand loyal though I admit my heart is often with Olympus equipment.  A big part of me tries to blog about "off brand" cameras not named Nikon or Canon because I recognize there isn't a big forum for photographers out there that shoot with the other brands.  And to be completely honest I'm the kind of guy that will usually cheer for the underdog.  Then again, I use Canon cameras as well.  But despite my love for photography equipment I hope that my passion for the art of photography comes through as the most important thing on this blog.  I truly believe that it isn't the equipment that makes the image, its the artist.  

I appreciate you dropping by this blog and I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I do writing it.  If you'd like to participate through comments or on the Facebook page that would mean a lot to me.